Dappled Things: Five Poems by Robin Chapman + Five Photogravures by Peter Miller

The following poems and photogravures originally appeared in Dappled Things by Robin Chapman and Peter Miller (Paris: Revue K, 2013): poems by Robin Chapman and photogravures by Peter Miller, copyright 2013 by the author and artist, all rights reserved.

Dappled Things

Always the world-spun light casts patternsraveled through the wind-thrown clouds, the forest’sbranch-broken loom, across the hoof-scraped mossand snow-banks, the backs of browsing mule deerwhose swiveling ears listen for the whispered soundof the tawny cougar’s padding walk. Dark and light,sleep and wake and dream course through our livesto make us what we are—sun and shadow-clothed,bedrock and layers of fertile soil, green climband blight of history, wind-taken, time-woundand wounded, heart-bound to world’s warp and weft.

Landscape

What’s native? This stretch of yard once marshfringed by tall-grass prairie, fire-swept, drainedto re-emerge in cherry, hickory, oak all felledfor lumber, fallow in winter, tilled to cornfieldfringing the edge of town—come house, grass,elms, honeysuckle border creeping in—nowwe machete-slash the stems of indigo, beebalm,asters and goldenrod for slow compost, clearso that the tender crocus, scilla, and daffodilswill lift their faces through leaf drift to the earlybees and each of us weary of winter sleep.

Spare

I watch the black crow, wing-wrenched,walking on snow—how we can go on,go on, memory-borne, through cold,through wind’s work, loved world,till owl-dusk or fox-dawn. I want to walkwith my friends through broken-winged days,want words to lift us back to the ordinary air,to spare us pain. I want the words, when timecomes, to speak by our graves, to comfortthe living, honor the dead, lay each of us to restearth-borne, shroud-wound or wind-kissed,grateful for life’s brief flight of joy, light-blest.

Who Knows How

this life goes on as we step and turn,looking into each other’s face as the fiddle music playsthe fluent syncopation of the hambo waltz,our center of gravity holding between us, anchoredas weight shifts from me to you and back againas we turn and spin, turn and spin—musicholding us in its arms.